Abstract

NEWS / REEL (2005) are two related works that were developed during a residency at the Media Archive of Central England (MACE), one of three undertaken as part of the Arts Council England Necessary Journeys programme (the other artists were Keith Piper and Jackie Kay). Necessary Journeys took its cue from the BFI’s Black World initiative, and culminated with a conference at Tate Modern, and the launch of an eponymous publication (November 2005).

NEWS takes the form of a postcard book, an idiosyncratic 'A to Z' that selectively reproduces the rhetoric of the archive-as-index, highlighting both explicit and oblique preoccupations with the foreign and strange. The perforated edges encourage the deconstruction and re-circulation of ‘old news’ as ‘new news’, questioning their historicity, as missives form the archive. REEL re-edits footage to investigate cultural display and consumption, and gazes produced and mediated by the archive.

NEWS / REEL have been presented at a number of conferences including ‘Location: the Museum, the Academy, and the Studio’, the 34th AAH Annual Conference, in the session, ‘Archival Impulse: Location and No-Place’, Tate Britain (2008); and Matters of Perception: Articulating Hybridity, the Inaugural Gertz Distinguished Teaching Series, Alfred University, New York (2008). In addition, the project is discussed in ‘susan pui san lok: Journeys, Documenting, Indexing, Archives, and Practice-led Research, a conversation with Marquard Smith’ in Art Journal (Winter issue, vol.65, no.4, 2006).

NEWS featured in two group exhibitions in 2010, Tables of Thought, and How We Became Metadata (see additional information below); a selection of images from NEWS were published in Paperweight: A Newspaper of Visual and Material Culture (London: Polygraphia, 2011, n.2). REEL also featured in How We Became Metadata, and has previously screened as part of Collective Rhythm (Bigger Picture Big Dance programme) at Cornerhouse and BBC Big Screen, Manchester, July 2006; Arcade (group exhibition), Westbourne Studios, London, September 2006; and Artists in the Archive (Bigger Picture screening programme), Cornerhouse and BBC Big Screen, Manchester, 2008.

Venue Details

Tables of Thought; How We Became Metadata

Location: Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki; University of Westminster

Dates: 28-29 April 2010; 20 May-1 August 2010

Item Type:

Show/Exhibition

Additional Information:

How We Became Metadata (2010) is a group exhibition curated by Dr Marquard Smith, for the University of Westminster Gallery (the other invited artists are Thompson and Craighead, Eduardo Kac, Uriel Orlow and Ruth Maclennan).
Tables of Thought is an exhibition and symposium organised by the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and the European Artistic Research Network (EARN), developed by Jan Kaila and Henk Slager. Taking place in the gallery of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (Kuvagalleria), the event focuses on the paradoxical tension within current debates on artistic research between the urge for disciplinary knowledge and the constant subversion of this by artistic thinking. As an invited artist and speaker (participating alongside Maria Finn, Daniel Jewesbury, Katrin von Maltzahn, Lauren O'Neal, Michael Stevenson, Nina Temporaer and Lars Wallsten), the work presented, NEWS (2005) and Golden Hour (2006), relate to the conceptual play on the taxonomic impulse integral to disciplinary practices and with the mercurial and destabilising flows of artistic thinking and research.
Tables of Thought is part of an ongoing and unique trans-European experiment in arts research organised by EARN in association with Centrifugal and led by GradCAM, Ireland. This second phase of the project builds upon, and extends, the examination and critical contestation of the archival paradigm in artistic research and curatorial practice initiated at the exhibitions Critique of Archival Reason (curated by Henk Slager, RHA Gallery, Dublin, 2010) and Re: Public (curated by Daniel Jewesbury, TBG, Dublin, 2010) which were held in conjunction with the conference Arts Research: Publics and Purposes (http://www.gradcam.ie, Dublin, February 2010).